Love and Freedom

The Connection between Love and Freedom 

In the history of ideas, there has long been a connection made between freedom and love. Many thinkers have thought of God's love, in the case of theologians, or of the One’s creativity, in the case of philosophical metaphysicians, as a granting of space for creation to become itself apart from its source. Jacques Lacan’s idea of the Real as that which resists our symbolic intentions absolutely, can also be seen as a sort of holding open of space, or indeterminacy, so there might be something other than our intentions for, or our determinations of, creation. Phenomenology brackets the metaphysics of creation entirely as that which is beyond the horizon of the intention, so that creation is simply the gift of the givenness presented to the subject’s intention as the phenomena of creation. 

One way to conceive of this pure, because non-transactional, gift of phenomenological givenness, which is called intentional “givenness” or “aboutness” in phenomenology, is as the astonishing fact that there is something rather than nothing, which is more accurately the relationship between something and nothing that produces the phenomena of the world as opposed to the absolute, because stable, void that produces nil. Samuel Beckett, with some annoyance at the void’s instability, called it the “Incontinent Void.” And Paul Vallery said of this incontinence, which is being itself, that it was a “blemished on the purity of nonbeing.” However, the Catholic Phenomenologist, Jean Luc Marion called the dialectic between being and nonbeing, “Love.” And Slovoj Zizek calls this love that has given us the world, the “failure of the One to be at one with itself,” which is why love is famously both “evil” and “an act of extreme violence” for Zizek. 

For creation to develop freely, it needs to be given both space and restraints, so what is given as creation is not just the space for entropy to spread out, but also the restraints of the physical laws that govern the relationship between matter and energy and limit, at least temporarily, entropy’s progress in interesting ways. A possibility space is the relationship between the determinations of matter and the potential of energy. Energy gifts space to the singularity of matter to become different from itself as energy-matter. A possibility space is defined but not determined by the restraints of material and the push of energy. Entropy is the process of matter-energy spreading out from itself in clumpy ways that sometimes temporarily form planets or stars or black holes according to the given laws of physics, and very rarely form of the high above equilibrium “steady,” but only for a moment, states of negentropy called, “life.” 

Giles Deleuze makes the distinction between an actualized and a realized possibility. A realized choice is a past choice that has been concretized, which philosophers called an actualized potential before Deleuze. An actual possibility is an actualized potential for Deleuze, but it is not entirely in the past, nor is it entirely closed because each concrete form from the past, whether conceptual or physical, when it is brought into the present, contains the present as the present’s virtuality, or openness, to novel relations of difference within the past’s relation to the present. What modern scientist and philosophers call a “possibility space” is “actual” possibility formed from the past because mere potential must be defined enough to form a set of “actual” alternatives in the present.   

Freedom without restraints is the nonsensical notion of “libertarian” freedom. The opposite of libertarian, or "absolute," freedom is the total determinism of the singularity, which would be everything that is compacted into one place, which Hegel called “Being-In-Itself" and science calls “the Singularity,” without any room for becoming different from itself. The becoming of difference is what creation is, specifically the creation of greater capacities for love as freedom to be the ground of the becoming of difference. The capacities for freedom and love grow in reciprocal relation to each other, which is the reason that the mystics preach "Non-Attachment.” God's love preceded God, which means God is the creation of love that creates through love as non-attachment. Non-attachment is used variously but in the case of First John’s “God is Love,” love means the non-attachment of granting being the space to become different. Love eternally generates God not as a static thing but as the process of creation itself. 

This sort of creation through the negation of the One, as a singularity, into the One as a multiplicity is accomplished by the gratuitous gift of the relation between freedom and restraint. Because creation is given as this processual relation between indeterminacy and determinacy, it is free to go wrong, and thus, the Problem of Evil emerges out of this sort of “no-guarantees” creation. There can be no Deus Ex Machina to sweep in when things good wrong to make things right because this would destroy the relation between freedom and restraint necessary for creation to be creative. Therefore, it is true that the produce of love is not only the Good, but also the good of irreducible ambiguity’s difference from the Good. And even the possibility of evil becomes a necessary, although parasitically defined possibility because love’s openness allows it and because love’s fundamental nature is to be an indeterminate procession rather than the closed, because completed, project of the Good. Jesus’s announcement of the apocalypse did not end the reign of evil and establish the reign of the good in perpetuum. Instead, it laid bare the relationship between the ambiguous good of freedom and the evil that it makes possible.  

Process Theologians see God's non-coercive love as the creation of space for indeterminate becoming, and then a lure back to love when things go wrong, rather than a determinate intervention, which would be to simply fix things. For Processes Theologians, God does not sweep in and make everything right because he can't without infantilizing, or determining, creation, so that it would no longer be creative. Creation means always becoming new, or different from itself, which is the process describe as differentiation by Process Philosophers. God's love does not eliminate nor restrict freedom but preserves it by luring people's free choices back to the intention of freedom itself, which is the intention to love by making free, and which is also in line with AA's motto of "attraction rather than promotion." God lures a free creation with the possibilities of love as freedom in any given situation, no matter how determined it may appear, as in the seemingly ineluctable determinations of addiction. For we addicts in recovery are building capacities to do “the next right thing" in situations that “used to baffle us,” except that the next right thing isn't pre-determined.  

Our “Higher Power” is present, as the next right thing, in any actual occasion that we may find ourselves in but not as an already determined good, which would make Him just one more objective determination. Because active love opens possibility spaces, evil can be a parasite on love, but not because evil is a “privation of the good,” but rather because of the excessive nature of love’s goodness, which is the irreducibly ambiguous good of freedom.